![]() ![]() She’d written a novel – an early take on what would become The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms – and sent it out to publishers, also taking science fiction and fantasy writing workshop Viable Paradise, where she gave short stories a try for the first time, and began selling her work. Then she hit 30, and had a “mini midlife crisis”. She carried on writing but gave up on any idea of publishing – she’d been to graduate school, she had student loans, it didn’t make sense to change careers. Jemisin trained as a psychologist and worked in universities, in a branch of counselling psychology specific to late adolescents. Not really the ideal way to handle it.” She discovered Octavia Butler in the 80s, and that “helped a great deal, but she was one person”. ![]() And so for all intents and purposes, he’s basically a white guy who just happens to have black skin. “There’s a paragraph when the black male character is introduced where Clarke pauses the story to basically explain to the audience that, you know, this character is black, but it doesn’t really matter anymore in the future. Jemisin recalls Arthur C Clarke’s Childhood’s End, in which Jan Rodricks, a black man, is the last human on Earth. Occasionally black characters would make their way into those stories written by white men. We were all exposed to nothing but white dude fiction and if that’s how you’ve grown up, then that is what is normal ![]()
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